30 BEROEMDE VERHALEN

by Edgar Allan Poe, Hermien Manger (translator)

One of the World's greatest and most influential masters of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe has also claimed as the originator of such important styles of fiction. Poe's singular ability to probe into the caverns of the psyche and reveal, through the medium of imaginative prose and poetry, that combination of fear, guilt and obsession common to mankind has insured his permanence amoung the great writers of the world.

Contents:
* The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination
* The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
* The Raven and Other Poems

441 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm, vreselijk boeiend en spannend vond ik deze verhalen niet… Heb ook niet álle 30 verhalen gelezen maar toch wel zo’n drie-kwart er van. Sommige verhalen vond ik ronduit saai maar anderen nog best boeiend zoals De moorden in de Rue Morgue, De gestolen brief en De zwarte kater.

Verder vond ik de layout van deze uitgave bijzonder onprettig dus dat was ook niet bevorderlijk voor m'n waardering.
In zijn geheel naar mijn idee wat gedateerd maar wel leuk eens wat meer van Poe gelezen te hebben. Hij is natuurlijk wel heel belangrijk geweest in de ontwikkeling van "Het Spannende boek"